Bolsavik.com

Following the jump is the full text of Quang Pham’s press release announcing his withdrawal.

If anything, the press release shows that GOP leaders, from the local to the national level, are just simply relieved that they were able to avert what could be a bloody primary contest between Pham and Assemblyman Van Tran.

It also appears that the leadership decided to step in after poll numbers predicted an extremely close and costly race. Said Rep. Ed Royce (in whose office Tran used to intern): “According to recent polling, Quang Pham would have been competitive in the primary election.”

Click on the jump to read more.

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Just as the Bolsavik finished talking about how OC GOP voters usually don’t think carpetbagging is such a big deal, lo and behold a GOP bigwig proved the Bolsavik right.

The OC Weekly (here) has the story about how Assemblyman Van Tran squeaked by first-time candidate Quang X. Pham for the California Republican Assembly endorsement for the CD47 race. He did it by having his chief of staff - a resident of Sacramento - vote out of the Stanton chapter.

If it weren’t for the carpetbagger, there would have been no endorsements.

The Weekly quoted Tim Whitacre, the group’s parliamentarian, as saying CRA bylaws allow a member to join “any branch he wants to join regardless of where he lives.”

So there you have it. Party activists sanction carpetbagging. That’s why it’s no big deal.

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The OC Register’s story about legislators’ tax-free income actually points out an interesting fact about Assemblyman Van Tran’s residence: It’s not in the Congressional district he’s running for.

The Register story here reveals that Van Tran’s official residence is his parents’ home in Westminster.

Van Tran is a candidate for the 47th Congressional district, and that district (map here) does not have any part of Westminster in it.

In fact, the home of Tran’s parents, located in a cul-de-sac near the corner of Bolsa and Magnolia, is in the 46th Congressional district, currently represented by Dana Rohrabacher.

Not that it legally matters; unlike other offices, for Congressional candidates the law (actually the US Constitution) only requires that they come from the same state and does not require that they live in the district.

What this does illustrate, though, is that most of the time a candidate’s residence doesn’t quite matter. Despite the negative connotations that come with being a “carpetbagger,” most of the time it’s not an issue. Especially in Orange County. Especially for a Republican.

Van Tran and his allies used to pour a lot of efforts and resources into supporting State Senate candidate Lynn Daucher.  She needed to establish residence in the 34th district, so she rented an apartment in Fullerton without living there. Garden Grove Councilman Andrew Do also rents a house in the city even though he already owns one somewhere else, but at least he’s living in the rental. And the current Republican candidate for the 34th State Senate district Sue Perez, she’s not living in the district now either.

So, if residence can be fudged when there’s a legal requirement, it certainly can be skirted when there’s no such requirement.

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Campaign disclosures for Q3 of 2009 were due last week, and the two Republicans vying to replace U.S. Rep. Loretta Sanchez both show healthy numbers.

Assemblyman Van Tran, known for his fundraising prowess, pulled in a modest $91,809, according to his campaign disclosure here. This apparently smaller-than-expected amount, however, may be due more to the vagaries of the calendar: The previous quarter, he amassed a whopping $253,921.

What’s a little more surprising, is that political neophyte Quang X. Pham also showed he’s no light-weight. (Report here.) With his first fundraiser taking place in mid August, Pham still took in $63,858 in contributions, and lent his campaign $62,500.

Both campaigns easily dwarf the last Viet to challenge Sanchez. In the 2006 elections, Tan D. Nguyen took in a total of just $116,345.43 in contributions for the entire election cycle.

Tran and Pham, however, still need to do a lot of work to catch up with the incumbent. Rep. Loretta Sanchez is sitting on a war chest of $769,010.75 (report here) of which $134,838.40 were raised this past quarter.

Which they are. Tran told the Bolsavik, for his Nguoi Viet story here in Vietnamese, that he plans to raise and spend between $1 and $1.5 million for the general elections. “We’re on target to meet that goal,” Tran said.

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In the Republican race to replace the termed-out Governator, Assemblyman Van Tran shows who he’s behind: State Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner.

Today, Tran accompanied Poizner on a campaign stop with Asian-American businesses in Orange County. That’s Tran to the left in the picture, with Poizner.

Poizner is a foreign-affairs guru who made his fortune in Silicon Valley. He’s best known for plunking down $2.5 million of his own money to defeat Proposition 93, a term-limit reform proposal that would have reduced the total amount of time state legislators could serve in either the Assembly or the State Senate down to 12 years from 14 years. Proposition 93 was defeated 54% to 46%.

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Surfed over to TheLiberalOC.com today and found that Chris Prevatt has posted (here) the audio of 9-1-1 calls and the police dispatches relating to Westminster City Councilman Andy Quach’s drunk driving crash on August 1 that severed a power pole and cut off power to 300 people. (Then he plowed into the concrete wall, shown in photo.)

So the Bolsavik called the Westminster PD and Sgt. Dan Schoonmacher confirmed the audio is authentic.

Part of the audio has the call coming in from the driver whose car Quach had hit.

Contrary to earlier reports, when he called 9-1-1 the driver said he’d been hit pretty hard and thought he’d been injured.

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Did Assemblyman Van Tran, in only one sentence, just cause a conflict of interest that forever bars the mighty law firm of Snell & Wilmer from conducting any business before the City of Westminster?

The Bolsavik knows very little of how the public law business works, but some of the things that just happened raised the issue.

Assemblyman Van Tran is a lawyer, yes, but he’s not a free-floating, unattached lawyer the way he was when he had his solo office on Bolsa. He’s now affiliated with a law firm, being of-counsel to the 400-attorney-strong Snell & Wilmer L.L.P.

Now, the rule is, in a law firm, a conflict of interest by one lawyer affects all their lawyers.

Most large law firms have a database and full-time people dedicated just to make sure the numerous relationships by their hundreds of lawyers don’t conflict with the firm’s work.

Now, Van Tran just went out of his way to identify himself, several times and on recorded audio tape, to law enforcement officers, that he’s the lawyer to Westminster City Councilman Andy Quach (read here; source here). That probably makes Quach his client.

As a matter of law, that would make Andy Quach a client of the entire firm of Snell & Wilmer.

Does that mean that as long as Quach sits on the Westminster City Council, Snell & Wilmer (and its hundreds of lawyers) is barred from conducting any business for, and/or before, and/or against, the city?

Does it mean Snell & Wilmer can’t represent the city?

Does it mean Snell & Wilmer can’t represent any of its thousands of clients with businesses before the city?

Does it mean that Snell & Wilmer can never represent any clients, even the numerous developers who are its current clients, who want to sue the city?

And if Snell is currently representing anyone suing or doing business with Westminster, does it mean the firm has to conflict out and renounce that business?

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That disturbing fact came from transcript of audio tapes from the scene, revealed by Westminster Police Chief Andrew Hall in his interview with Bharath.

The transcript showed that Tran came and claimed to be Quach’s lawyer. The police asked him to step back, so he complied.

But only briefly. A bit later, he stepped in again and a sergeant had to tell him one more time to stand back.

So he did. But then two minutes later, when a DUI expert was administering the field sobriety test to Quach, Tran distracted Quach and disrupted the field sobriety test.

The sergeant told Tran: “Sir, I’ve asked you to back up over there.”

“I’m his lawyer,” Tran told the officer.

“I don’t care who you are, you need to back up over there,” the sergeant told Tran. “I understand you’re his attorney but you are interfering. You need to stand over there. If you come back over here, I’m going to have you arrested.”

So Tran finally complied and did not interfere again.

Chief Hall confirmed that, contrary to rumors running rampant in Little Saigon, the assemblyman was not in Quach’s car at the time of the accident.

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Proving that it’s wise not to put all eggs in one basket, especially one that’s hard to get, Assemblyman Van Tran is keeping alive his campaign for the seat to be vacated by termed-out State Senator Tom Harman.

Last week, Tran filed the Form 410 with the Secretary of State here, providing him with something to fall back on just in case his ambitions to go to D.C. don’t pan out. This is the same race for which Tran filed his statement of intent way back in January - read more here.

Harman’s seat is theoretically not up until 2012, but Harman has filed an intent to run for state Attorney General in 2010 - and if Harman wins, then Tran seems to say that other Republicans better stay out of his way. He yielded once before, to Lynn Daucher; ain’t yielding again.

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Quang X. Pham, the former Navy aviator who introduced John McCain to the Vietnamese-American community in 2000, is throwing his hat in the ring and telling the OC Register’s Martin Wisckol here that he too will run for U.S. Rep. Loretta Sanchez’s Congressional seat.

And so are met the expectations of two men considered most likely to run for Congress. Prior to Pham contacting Wisckol, Assemblyman Van Tran had already announced his intention (here). Tran and Pham are the two Viets most observers have expected to run for federal office.

The two men, however, took different routes there. While Tran was being the good political soldier, working his way up the GOP ladder, Pham was in the military, flying combat aircrafts and writing about it. While Tran half-heartedly ran a solo law practice, biding his time for political glory, Pham ran his own pharmaceutical marketing company.

In the Viet community, Pham is celebrated as a particularly articulate bilingual speaker who proudly wears on his sleeve both his military service in the U.S. and his heritage as the son of a South Vietnamese military officer. Both elements figured prominently in Pham’s book A Sense of Duty: My Father, My American Journey. He has his own web site here.

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